Philip Berrigan, the former Roman Catholic priest who led the draft
board raids that galvanized opposition to the Vietnam War in the late 1960s,
died Friday night in Baltimore after a lifetime of battling "the American
Empire," as he called it, over the morality of its military and social
policies. He was 79.
His family said the cause was liver and kidney cancer.
An Army combat veteran sickened by the killing in World War II, Berrigan
came to be one of the most radical pacifists of the 20th century -- and, for a
time in the Vietnam period, a larger-than-life figure in the convulsive
struggle over the country's direction.
In the late '60s, he was a Catholic priest serving a poor black parish in
Baltimore and seeing nothing that would change his conviction that war, racism
and poverty were inseparable strands of a corrupt economic system.
His Josephite superiors had previously hustled him out of Newburgh, N.Y.,
for aggressive civil rights and anti-war activity there; the "fatal blow," he
said, had been a talk to a community affairs council in which he asked, "Is it
possible for us to be vicious, brutal, immoral and violent at home and be fair,
judicious, beneficent and idealistic abroad?"
He hardly missed a beat after his transfer to Baltimore, founding an anti-
war group, Peace Mission, whose operations included picketing the homes of
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk in December
1966.
By the fall of 1967, Berrigan and three friends were ready to try a new
tactic. On Oct. 17, they walked into the Baltimore Customs House, distracted
the draft board clerks and methodically spattered Selective Service records
with a red liquid made partly from their own blood.
Three decades later, Berrigan remembered feeling "exalted" as the judge
sentenced him to six years in prison. From then on, he would be in and out of
jail for repeated efforts to interfere with government operations and deface
military hardware.
Even before his sentencing for the Customs House raid, Berrigan instigated
a second invasion, against the local draft board office in Catonsville, Md.
Among those persuaded to join was his older brother, the Rev. Daniel Berrigan,
a Jesuit priest and poet, who had been one of the first prominent clergymen to
preach and organize against the war.
The "Catonsville Nine" struck on May 17, 1968, taking hundreds of files
relating to potential draftees from the second floor of the Knights of
Columbus building, where the draft board rented space. They piled the
documents in the parking lot and set them burning with a mixture of gasoline
and soap chips -- homemade napalm.
With so many marches and campus protests going on across the country, it
would have been impossible to quantify the effect of a single event on public
opinion. What can be said about the Catonsville raid is that it inspired
others in New York City, Milwaukee, Boston, Chicago and other cities, the
tactic becoming a sort of calling card of the "ultraresistance."
It also elevated the Berrigan brothers to the status of superstars. The two
were on the cover of Time magazine and illuminated in profiles by the smartest
writers.
But many Americans saw them as traitors, or at best naive dupes of the Viet
Cong.
Berrigan had lived at Jonah House, a communal living facility of war
resisters, for much of the past decade.
In a final statement released by his family, he said, "I die with the
conviction, held since 1968 and Catonsville, that nuclear weapons are the
scourge of the earth; to mine for them, manufacture them, deploy them, use
them, is a curse against God, the human family and the Earth itself."
Chronicle news services contributed to this report.